Mike Isaac

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Twitter’s Glass App Spotted in the Wild (And, Yes, It’s Probably Real)

Glassheads, alert! You may be able to tweet from your eyes soon enough.

Twitter is likely testing its app for Glass, Google’s good old-fashioned foray into wearable computing eyeframes, which could eventually let users send hands-free tweets from their face.

Here’s what we know: Google has attached the hashtag “#throughglass” to Google+ posts made using the Glass hardware. Earlier this week, Twilio developer Jon Gottfried hacked together his own rudimentary Twitter Glass application, using Google’s Glass API (released earlier this month in a limited form). He also decided to use that hashtag for tweets sent through his app, GlassTweet.

Funny enough, Gottfried noticed some other tweets showing up under the #throughglass hashtag. As was first reported by TechCrunch, these weren’t sent from Gottfried’s app, but had a “Twitter for Glass” label stamped on the bottom.

Weird? Yes. But is it real? Probably also yes.

How am I so sure? Glad you asked!

First, if you’re a developer, you can’t stick “Twitter” on just any tweet that passes through the stream. Twitter restricts the creation of apps with “Twitter” in the name, like so:

Second, the tweet in question came from an account named “@MogroothMuddler,” which has since been deleted. However, check out the handle “@Mogrooth”; it belongs to Shiv Ramamurthi, a mobile engineering manager over at Twitter who uses the handle “Mogrooth” across multiple accounts, including his LinkedIn profile and other currently active Twitter accounts that he looks to be using as testing handles.

Not enough proof? Go check out the Twitter accounts of Googlers Sidney Chang, Yury Pinsky, Sophia Yang and Steve Lee, which Gottfried pointed out to me.

So there you have it! Though my guess is this isn’t really some super duper uber secret thing that broke out into the stream by accident. Feels like a controlled leak, meant to drum up some interest for Twitter’s app and Google’s hardware.

Which is fine, and not unheard of. Taking bets on how long until we see an actual app released, though. Perhaps, with Twitter’s track record of teasing its releases, we’ll see something sooner rather than later.

Oh, yeah, and I got an official “no comment” from Twitter. I’m sure the app, once we see it, will speak for itself.

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First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

— Parker Higgins via Twitter